Posted
by
samzenpuson Thursday September 03, 2009 @12:34AM
from the lazlo-approved dept.

coondoggie writes "The airborne military laser which promises to destroy, damage or disable targets with little to no collateral damage has for the first time actually blown something up. Boeing and the US Air Force today said that on Aug. 30, a C-130H aircraft armed with Boeing's Advanced Tactical Laser (ATL) blasted a target test vehicle on the ground for the first time. Boeing has been developing the ATL since 2008 under an Air Force contract worth up to $30 million."

If the blind people are melted, they tend to complain about it a lot less.

But seriously, this probably wouldn't be as effective against personnel as it would against large vehicles or buildings. Individuals are too small and mobile for a weapon like this to have any great effect. There are already TONS of anti-personnel weapons in existence now anyway.

We already have plenty weapons with lots of collateral damage and they're being used, that was never in dispute. The question was how can this be a weapon "with little to no collateral damage" if in fact the reflections do collateral damage. If we didn't care about colleteral we could just throw a nuke at it.

The Advanced Tactical Laser (ATL) program is a US military program to mount a high energy laser damage weapon on an aircraft, initially the AC-130 gunship, for use against ground targets in urban or other areas where minimizing collateral damage is important. The laser will be a megawatt-class chemical oxygen iodine laser (COIL). It is expected to have a tactical range of approximately twenty kilometers and weigh about 5,000â"7,000 kg. This program is distinct from the Airborne Laser, which is a much larger system designed to destroy enemy missiles in the boost phase.

Weapons like this actually make an ICBM strike *more* likely against the US. If conventional war were to break out between the US and a country like China, with neither party really wanting a nuclear escalation but reserving their nukes as a deterrent, they'd be afraid that if they lost the ability to effectively shoot down aircraft over their territory they'd also lose the ability to launch ICBM's in case of escalation. So, at the first sign of the US gaining air superiority, they'd go ahead and launch ICBM's.
Not really. First, this is the ATL. It is a different craft with a different mission. It is designed to take out targets on the ground. Second, for us to take out China's missile, we would have to have multiples of these craft located deep inside of this countries AND all over the world. The reason is that China has a number of boomers and is building 1-2 new nuclear boomers EACH YEAR. In fact, they will surpass America's count in the next 2 years. As it is, China now has boomers patroling both the American Atlantic and Pacific seaboards as well as the Mexican gulf (Venezuela has begun quietly allowing them to have port calls). We also know that China has at least 10 boomers, and will surpass it within 4 years (more likely 2). In addition, to be able to take out all of China's sites with this would require us to be in every country that surrounds China, with multiple aircraft (and russia would require at least 4 to 8 of these). Think we can swing that? Neither does China. TO be honest, we will probable need a lot more. China appears to be building new nuclear warheads. They restarted their factory last decade. They started their build-up before we decided anything about the ABLs.

Finally, the ABL shooting horizontally will have a range of around 500-700. It it probable that it would have a range far shorter over china due to their pollution. In addition, this craft will become more ineffective on 2'nd and third round since dust would have been kicked into the air.

Excellent -- someone on the internet who understands the logic of MAD!It's troubling how many Americans don't seem to get that strength is all well and good, but peace and security require cooperation under a relative balance of power. Terrorism is "asymmetric warfare," but people take those means because symmetric warfare is impossible and they won't accept asymmetric diplomacy any more...

It is prohibited to employ laser weapons specifically designed, as their sole combat function or as one of their combat functions, to cause permanent blindness to unenhanced vision, that is to the naked eye or to the eye with corrective eyesight devices.

Causing blindness is not a combat function of this weaponry; it's a side-effect of the other side trying to subvert the weapon. They were also not specifically designed to have such an effect. Their goal is to blow shit up from the air, with a particular emphasis on fired projectiles but probably used for vehicles as well (as per this example). In most cases there won't even be anybody around to get blinded.

A bullet through the eye can cause blindness too, that doesn't make it banned. Intent matters.

"Yeah, those morons should've made their tanks from black holes. (Hint: if you can see it, it reflects light.)"

OK so according to you, something that can blind you after traveling millions upon millions of miles through space will also inevitably blind you upon reflecting off any visible surface? Just like, you know, looking outside during the day?

Article 3Blinding as an incidental or collateral effect of the legitimate military employment of laser systems, including laser systems used against optical equipment, is not covered by the prohibition of this Protocol.

So if one of those common laser targeters or this super laser can blind you, they still comply since they weren't designed specifically to blind people, they come under "incidental or collateral effect".

You're just not supposed to:

"employ laser weapons specifically designed, as their sole combat function or as one of their combat functions, to cause permanent blindness to unenhanced vision"

Do you consider general Taguba, who conducted investigation of Abu Ghraib valid source? According to him [telegraph.co.uk] prisoner were raped among other things. Is it good enough example of violation for you?
I also remember (not link this time, but should not be hard to find) of hooded prisoner attached to multiple wires. The whole scene looked like something from Frankenstein.

Remember, the Geneva conventions are primarily concerned with the treatment of uniformed members of national military forces (and includes definitions of such).

Whole 4th convention is about civilians. Most relevant here is article 5, talking about spies and saboteurs (or in American newspeak "illegal enemy combatants"). Direct quote: [http]
"In each case, such persons shall nevertheless be treated with humanity and, in case of trial, shall not be deprived of the rights of fair and regular trial prescribed by the present Convention. They shall also be granted the full rights and privileges of a protected person under the present Convention at the earliest date consistent with the security of the State or Occupying Power, as the case may be."
Seems pretty clear, doesn't it?

It also is only in force when engaged in war with another state that is also bound by the convention.

Like Iraq which ratified it in 1956? Ah, I forgot: you just need to slap 'liberation' sticker on your invasion and it is ok.

Legally, at least; morally/politically is a different game, of course.

What is the problem? You just need to redefine 'morality', like 'torture' and 'war' got redefined.

"Where in occupied territory an individual protected person is detained as a spy or saboteur, or as a person under definite suspicion of activity hostile to the security of the Occupying Power, such person shall, in those cases where absolute military security so requires, be regarded as having forfeited rights of communication under the present Convention.

In each case, such persons shall nevertheless be treated with humanity and, in case of trial, shall not be deprived of the rights of fair and regular trial prescribed by the present Convention. They shall also be granted the full rights and privileges of a protected person under the present Convention at the earliest date consistent with the security of the State or Occupying Power, as the case may be."

A protected person detained as a spy or saboteur. Non uniformed terrorists do not fall under the "protected person" definition. So they are not protected by the GC.

International conventions haven't prevented war, torture, genocide or other massive human rights abuses. They are the constructs of an intellectual class that has their heads in the sand until it is to late to prevent the very acts they claim to be preventing.

Why land size and not population? Emissions are fundamentally related to electricity consumption (when produced by coal and oil plants) and gasoline use. Each of these are proportional to population. All else being equal, if the population doubles the electricity consumption doubles. Population density plays a role, but only by making mass transit somewhat less effective.

Boo, Fuckity, Hoo. War is SUPPOSED to be inhumane, SUPPOSED to be degrading, SUPPOSED to be horrible.

It is well that war is so terrible - otherwise we would grow too fond of it.
Robert E. Lee, Statement at the Battle of Fredericksburg (13th December 1862)
US-Confederate general (1807 - 1870)

All the people crying OMG WE HAVE INTERNATIONAL LAWS AGAINST DOING THIS AND THIS AND THIS are the kind of people who don't understand this fact. The more horrible war is, the less likely it will happen. The population of the west today just doesn't get that war is ugly, they've pacified themselves culturally to believe that war is NOT the ugly horrible thing it always was, and always will be, and seem to think that OMG A CIVILIAN DIED THIS IS AN OUTRAGEEEEEEEEEEEE is how you should respond to finding out 20 enemy fighters died...but 1 civilian did as well cause the enemy was hiding in a family's house. I don't really care that I'll get modded as flamebait/troll because this is the fact of life in western society. They've been pussified since WW2 and can't handle a real war. God forbid the chinese or russians ever decide to have a real war with another country, the citizenry of the west will collectively shit their pants and break down into tears at the 'atrocities' they'll hear about that happen in what a real war should/does look like.

Only if horrors happen to both sides. If horrible things only happen to the other guy, most of the population forgets the war is even happening.As for people not understanding that war is horrible -- of *course* people understand that; did you really think millions of Americans protested the invasion of Iraq because they liked Hussein? Complaining about civilian deaths is a weak fallback for people who don't have a clear enough anti-war position, something along the lines of "if you have to go kick in the

"Uh, no, only Americans have convinced themselves that due to not having a war on their own soil in 150 years. Europeans (both West and East) are damn fucking well aware of how nasty and horrible war is."

The United States had war on its soil until 1890 (119 years ago), mass terrorism in 1993, 1995 and all out war in 2001. Or don't you remember the 3000 people dying back then?

The United States had war on its soil until 1890 (119 years ago), mass terrorism in 1993, 1995 and all out war in 2001. Or don't you remember the 3000 people dying back then?

See, this is perfectly illustrates my point regarding the American civilian perspective on and experience of the horrors of war.

You think two whole buildings getting knocked down is "all out war". You think one guy setting off one bomb in OK City who wasn't even part of an extensive network like al Qaeda, or the singular bomb exploded

There was no specification of "all out war" or "real war" or "total war."

I didn't call two buildings being knocked over "all out war", I called it war.

Yes there was and yes you did. You're the one who specified "all out war in 2001." Read your own damn post [slashdot.org] please.

And I was of course talking about "real" war, and "total" war, because I was talking about what civilians went through in WWII. I thought you were trying to make a point, not ignore the context of the discussion in order to be pedantic.

and yes, we do obey international convention. The treaties say that no weapon can be designed for the purpose of taking out somebodies vision. These lasers are NOT designed for that purpose. Just like many bombs are not designed to kill, there is collateral damage. The ATL was designed to DESTROY a target similar to how a bomb would work. Likewise, the ABL is designed to collapse a sidewall of a missile. If somebody 'hardens' it causes the collateral damage, how is that America's fault?

Well, this is a poster child for why the US should not follow such conventions. Killing someone with a laser while risking eye damage to those nearby is far more humane than bombing the entire neighborhood. Screw the inhumane convention.

I was looking for a good place to crack a "Real Genius" joke. There's already a thread about popcorn... something about a "Real Genius" thought of that...

A mirror surface will harden the target, but even the best mirrors do not reflect all light and a combat laser can still burn a hole in it very fast.

Surprisingly, a mirror wouldn't work nearly as well as cheap glossy white paint.

Mirrors reflect (typically) 60-70% of the light that hits them, turning the rest into heat. Cheap, glossy, exterior-grade white paint often reflects in excess of 90% of the light back.

In other words, mirrors would turn about 4x as much of the light into heat as the white paint will. The difference is that mirrors reflect light without losing its coherency. White paint, on the other hand, just reflects the light in random directions.

Visible light they reflect you mean. This is a hard concept for many people to grasp, but depending on the part of the spectra you are looking at, objects can vary to how much they reflect and how much they transmit. If everyone chooses the same reflector, like a cheap paint, you just gotta change the frequency of the light.

A great example is silver. In the very close UV, like 310 nm, it's completely transparent. Light goes thru it perfectly. by the time you get to Green light, it's over 90% effective at reflections. Good, somewhat expensive, white paint used as a reflectance standard is good between 250-2500 nm. The type of laser they have is about 1000 or so nm. Using frequency doublers you can make that high UV in 3 jumps and below the bottom of where the paint can reflect well. I've used such high powered lasers in Academia. Doublers are common.

You're screwed if you're a ground target. On the other hand, a lot of laser systems (although not necessarily this one) are aimed at intercepting missiles. Missiles have more options...

First, a missile can spin. That help keeps the laser off one spot. Next is to introduce a wobble - difficult to do, although with modern control systems not completely impossible - that also keeps the laser hitting a varying spot. Lastly, if your rocket has a cryogenic fuel (i.e., LOX + LH2), you can pump your fuel through capillaries under the skin of your rocket before entering the rocket motor. That'll absorb whatever energy the laser does impart. Of course, that doesn't work with a ballistic missile after its ascent stage... but at that point you're hopefully relying on decoys.

A mirror surface will harden the target, but even the best mirrors do not reflect all light and a combat laser can still burn a hole in it very fast.

Any laser that can melt mirrors very quickly would self-destruct even faster unless its own mirrors were constantly changed. Well, I s'pose you'd only have to change the surface rather than the entire mirror. Either operation would be tricky to do precisely in field conditions. Also remember, the atmosphere itself is gonna tend to scatter that beam, so if you want to melt mirrors from a distance, your own are gonna have to get considerably hotter.

A decent reflective surface seems like it would be good enough to protect a building from this, although if the planes can also drop, say, rocks, that takes care of that. On a person, running around with a mirror would not do wonders for concealment. Personally, if I thought I was gonna be on the wrong end of a hurtin' laser, I'd light a smoky fire, kick up lots of dust, and/or wear thick layers of heat-resistant material like Kevlar while moving around a lot.

First surface mirrors like the ones used in frickin' lasers can be made much more reflective than ordinary household mirrors. Covering a tank with 99.99% reflective precision mirrors would get awfully expensive, and any bit of dust or grease on them would ruin the whole deal.

The laser itself needs several small laser-quality mirrors. The target would need a much larger quantity of the same mirrors, and in the same spectrum as the weapon. A plain bathroom mirror is not smooth enough to reflect that much without those imperfections absorbing a good bit of energy. If the laser really does use 'as much power as a household over an hour' then we are talking about 10kwh. 3.6E7 joules, over how ever large the surface area of the 'impact' point is, and you end up with a lot of heat in that 5 second burst.

Nope, that is definitely is going to take high quality mirrors to protect. For a moving target, say a rocket that is going to undergo high G acceleration, those mirrors will probably not survive launch. Other mobile targets, maybe. Buildings, well, putting meter tall neon letters on the roof saying 'this building is important' would be just as conspicuous. Mirrors, meet Predator. I think it has 500lbs of some iron that it would like you to meet.

Just reflect the light STRAIGHT BACK WHERE IT CAME FROM, and all those distortions will lead it to the point of origin. Three mirrors arranged as a corner of a cube do just that -- this is how a bicycle reflector works.

You do realize that aiming a laser back at a moving aircraft from the ground with a device rugged enough to be carried by a fighting vehicle is a "non-trivial problem".

Just getting said device on the correct side of the vehicle will be tricky enough in the environment where you'd see an AC-

Thank god this circumvents the stipulation in the Geneva Convention against weapons that cause blindness. As the lasers purpose is stated as an anti-vehicular weapon, the side affect of inducing blindness is A-OK.

As in the Falkland war, one flash and your pilots retina is ash.
A 'ship' can just light up the sky with its weapons based laser system and the tame media will never know.
Thank god the embedded media will never tell the truth about weapons that cause blindness or phosphorus weapons;)

It's still a chemical laser. It's quite possible to make chemical lasers powerful enough to be used as weapons, but so far the equipment has been too big to be very useful. The Mobile Tactical High-Energy Laser is able to shoot down artillery shells and small rockets, but the equipment takes up three trailers and costs too much.

The solid state laser people are catching up. The current output record is around 100 KW. [northropgrumman.com] This is enough to be marginally useful for anti-aircraft use. Around a megawatt, things start to get militarily interesting.

Cooling is a huge problem for the solid state devices, though. With the chemical lasers, most of the heat is dumped with the spent chemicals. For the solid state devices, the gear has to be cooled, and efficiency is only around 20%.

For the solid state gear, you can use heat exchangers running along the exterior of the aircraft. It's mighty chilly at FL350. You just need efficient heat pipes to get the heat outside (like you mentioned).

I don't think anyone planning this project ever believes that this chemical laser will make it into service(the logistics are horrible)- however the aiming and mirroring systems will and solid state lasers should 'snap in'

Yeah, this gives me lots of faith in my assignment to look at a specified wiki entry and verify the entry by using.... articles from journalists. Maybe I will write my paper instead on how this assignment proves nothing since the journalist probably used Wikipedia to write the damn thing.

It could have been worse, it could have been something like "produces 300,000 volts of power, which in watts per second is larger than an aircraft carrier and enough to burn down the entire Library of Congress..."

My company's developer had a side job as "computer support engineer" for this group a couple month ago (translate: 45/hr to configure software and as a human "fail-safe"). They actually did the first test fire a month or two back.

It was only half successful.

It did destroy the target which he described as a "basketball sized item" while traveling at ~450mph or whatever a C-130 cruises at (not supersonic). Unfortunately one of the chemicals has a ph of 17 and is stored at 2500 psi. When the tank developed a leak everyone had to don gas masks, move the cockpit and then make an emergency landing before it ate the plane. A full hazmat crew run by the company had to be flown in from Albuquerque to run decontamination.

It makes me think that perhaps if they just shot those chemicals rather than the laser it might be just as effective and quite a bit cheaper.

1) It'd probably count as chemical warfare2) It cannot hit anything nearly as fast or track it as accurately3) Not everything can be corroded4) If air for a target in a city with a laser and miss, turn off the laser and that's it.

Within water you can't have anything more basic than OH- since the base will just dissocate water and be neutralized (leaving lots of OH-). In other solvents you can have far more acidic and basic substances and do lots of chemistry that wouldn't be possible in water.

However, I don't believe that the actual term pH is defined outside of water, since it is the concentration of H3O+ which doesn't exist outside of water. You could define something analogous for another solvent. However, since that solvent w

Both systems employ a Chemical Oxygen Iodine Laser (COIL) that is made by combining a bunch of nasty chemicals - potassium, peroxide, chlorine, iodine and other stuff and then fired at supersonic speeds.

I'm pretty sure the laser fires at the speed of light which I guess is technically supersonic. Correct but a retarded way to explain technology the author clearly doesn't understand.

Then TFA follows up the next sentence with the following gem:

According to as post on Wikipedia...

So Wikipedia is a source of journalistic research now? Oh dear... This guy isn't even smart enough to hide the fact he used Wikipedia as a primary source AND he has a typo in the same sentence. Is he trying to get on the Slashdot editing staff?

Known as the SWEEPER, which is wicked short for short-range wide-field-of-view extremely-agile electronically-steered photonic emitters

"Wicked short"? Is this some teenager from Boston writing this? Not according to the picture but the author certainly writes like a high school freshman.

The article says that the the ABL uses a COIL laser which has an output wavelength of 1.315 Âm, the wavelength of transition of atomic iodine. What reflects light well at that infrared wavelength? Gold. Yup, just plate your missile with gold and it might be able to survive hits from a laser like this. They probably use gold on the mirror(s) used to aim this laser. The reflectivity of gold at 1.315 microns is about 98%.

So if this really is a 1MW laser, then only 20kWatts of energy gets through. Plus, the beam diverges, so at a long distance the beam diameter might be something like 1meter. The USAF probably can't even run this laser for very long or else it will self destruct. So, 20kWatts of energy that is pulsed for a few seconds over a 1meter area? You can design a missile to withstand that. Just plate it with gold, and put on some aerodynamic heat sinks and/or shield and/or insulation.

Because if it hits you anywhere near your eyes, the hole burned through your head will kill you. Since you'll only have a fraction of a second that you've been blinded due to your eyes melting, I really don't think you'll get a chance to file any sort of charge.